It sounds like the ultimate ‘duh’, but if you are a web developer or manage a website, make sure you perform regular backups of your site at the host. It is usually pretty easy to do, but also very easy to overlook. Don’t assume your hosting company has a back up of your account – most likely they don’t unless that is a part of your service.

We learned the tough way this weekend when our website became corrupted. I still don’t know if it was due to maintenance done on the host, a WordPress plugin that went rogue, or a hacker, but our SQL database became corrupt beyond repair and our site was lost.

In some ways it is fun to start new and fresh, and we did get the site back up (although with limited content) quickly. But lost in the process is a years worth of blog entries that will all now show up as dead links.

So take a minute and check with your hosting service or web management team. Set up a back up plan that backs your site up on a regular basis. Have some peace of mind that if the worst case happens you’ll be ok.